The Rest is Silence

by Scott Fotheringham

  “You heard her,” Leroy said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “I’m headed to the lab.”

  “But it’s your birthday.”

  Benny relented. She went to her bedroom and came out wearing a Red Sox cap and carrying a football. She put on running shoes that were well past their prime. She and Leroy crossed Lexington with a dozen busy people. A yellow cab nudged forward to find a hole in the pedestrian line.

  “When I first got here I waved them on like a polite Canadian,” he said. “Then I lost my patience one day and kicked a cab. Big mistake. He opened his door and I thought he was going to get me with a baseball bat or a gun or some other weird American shit.”

  The cab cut them off, its bumper coming a few inches from Leroy’s leg. He gave the cabbie the finger. Once they were across, Leroy asked Benny about her research.

  “Can we not talk about that? My Pseudomonas transformants aren’t surviving for some reason. They’re so slow growing even without being transformed.”

  “Is this not talking about it?”

  She shook her head. “Pseudomonas is supposed to grow on anything moist. Shit, it grows on soap, in sinks, in distilled water that’s been sterilized. But it won’t grow on my plates. They found it in the hospital last week on IV catheters.”

  “And they let you work on that in the hospital?”

  “It’s safe. Leach had hoped to be marketing one of these organisms months ago.”

  The last time she was in his office he had the patent office on one line and a vice-president from DuPont on the other.

  They walked through the park to the Sheep Meadow. Sunbathers, in various stages of undress, sat and lay on towels and blankets in clumps. The spaces between were sufficient for the occasional game of Frisbee. A man with dirty high-tops and T-shirt weaved from group to group selling cans of Budweiser out of a dripping grocery bag filled with ice.

  Benny shook the football at Leroy. He ran straight out and cut left in front of a couple making out on a blanket. Benny reached back and let go of the ball. She watched the ball arc up and toward him gracefully, the laces spiralling against the cloudless sky and tracing a parabola. He tossed it back. The ball wobbled in flight and landed in front of Benny. She ran to pick it up and yelled at him.

  “What was that? You throw like a fucking girl.”

  She hurled the ball back with a vengeance. It came to him horizontally. No parabola this time. It hit him in the gut.

  “All right, all right.”

  He wound up but again his throw was tentative. It tumbled through the air, off course and far wide of the mark. It rolled end over end toward the towel of a man who was reading by himself.

  “Heads up!” Benny shouted as she ran after it.

  The man didn’t even look up but reached to grasp the can beside him and kept on reading. She came jogging back to Leroy with the ball in her hands.

  “I’m not made of glass, man.”

  Leroy laughed. They threw the ball a few more times, then found a spot to sit and read. Late in the afternoon they passed the roller skaters on their way out of the park. One skater, fortyish and bald, danced around the elliptical surface with a static smile and an open can of Coke balanced on his head. As they stood on the boulevard of Park Avenue waiting for the light, Leroy said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Benny interrupted him as a cab honked, switching lanes in the intersection.

  “What?” he said.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  They walked to Madison before she spoke again.

  “I don’t want to spoil a nice afternoon. It’s rare for me to enjoy a guy’s company the way I enjoy yours.”

  “If you like being with me, why can’t we —”

  “I need a friend like you. I value that too much.”

  “We could still be friends.”

  “It would be different and you know it.”

  He stopped and put his hands on her shoulders. When he leaned toward her, Benny pushed him away.

  “No,” she said.

  He pouted all the way to Third Avenue.

  “Can I at least take you out for your birthday tonight?”

  *

  Late each Friday afternoon Dr. Nawthorn’s lab had an informal get-together. Gabe bought beer and they sat in the lab to gossip and laugh. Doug, the most recent addition to his lab, had decided to brew beer in the equipment room. He used flasks, beakers, and thermometers from the lab as though it were another experiment, and shared the results. His first attempts were strong. Leroy said it tasted like cheap champagne with an aftertaste of cough medicine, but he drank it anyway and found that a litre of the stuff, drunk from a beaker, was enough to obliterate his ambition for the night. He had to be certain that his work was done before he began drinking.

  Students from neighbouring labs were invited to join. Melvin Leach saw it as counterproductive, however, and discouraged his students from joining. Benny and Jon ignored the dictate.

  One Friday, Benny was sitting beside Cheng, a grad student from mainland China doing a rotation in Nawthorn’s lab. Benny sipped Doug’s latest experiment out of a 250-ml beaker and half listened to the usual round of crap that flew around the room on these afternoons. Doug was describing, in a booming voice, some live music he’d heard the weekend before. He was a drummer whose weekends were about jazz and beer. Cheng was nodding, but Benny had little interest in a recitation of percussion lore. Over by the incubator Jon was drinking coffee and regaling Lynn, also in Leroy’s lab, about the success of the book he had published.

  “The royalties don’t amount to much more than beer money,” he said, “but I have a name for myself now. My next book will be about getting in on the ground floor of the biotech IPO boom. You could get some useful hints from it.”

  “When do you find time to do this?” Lynn said. She had earned the nickname the Nun, not only because she buttoned her blouses up to the neck and wore calf-length skirts, but also because she cloistered herself in the lab no less than sixty hours each week.

  Jon tossed his Styrofoam cup into the wastebasket.

  “Recycling is so 1970,” he said, looking at Benny.

  Leroy and Gabe came into the room from Gabe’s office. Gabe walked over to Benny, pulled a bottle of beer from a paper bag he was carrying, and raised his eyebrows at her. She smiled and nodded and he passed it to her. She trusted Nawthorn, and he was one of the few people she ever had a drink with.

  “Hey, Timmins, did you see Leach’s latest squeeze?” Jon said.

  “What about her?” Leroy asked.

  “She’s got these buck teeth. She looks like Bugs Bunny.”

  “Jon,” Lynn said, laughing, “you’re mean.”

  Leroy sat down beside Benny. The next time Doug got loud, Benny put her beer down and touched Leroy’s sleeve.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

  He nodded. While the talk continued, they left the lab.

  Once outside, as they crossed York Avenue heading west, Benny said, “I owe you an explanation.”

  They went two blocks before she spoke again.

  “My father drowned four years ago,” Benny said. “In a lake near our house.”

  Leroy exhaled and shook his head.

  “After his funeral, I went back to school and studied. People told me to cheer up, find a boyfriend, to get out and do things. But it’s not like turning a tap on and off.” She looked at him. “You know that.”

  He nodded.

  “I was on the track team at college,” Benny said. “I trained for long distances. Anything over 10K. I thought of running a marathon.”

  She told him how the summer after her father died she lost interest in training. She went from running seventy miles a week to ten. Her body missed it, her mood grew darker, and she didn’t know if it was because she stopped running or because of her father’s death.

  “Your body must have been addicted to the endorphins,” Leroy said. />
  “It could have been that. So I started to train hard again.”

  “Did the depression go away?”

  She shook her head.

  They ended up in front of the Met, and Leroy suggested going in. The lobby was quieter than the time she had been before, when it had been full of boisterous schoolkids. Leroy asked if she had seen the European sculpture room, and because she hadn’t, he took her hand and led her there. The white marble pieces were inviting her to touch them. How could Rodin’s lovers, made of stone, look so warm, so animated? The lifelike bare limbs, lips, and breasts demanded to be caressed.

  “Get back from the sculpture,” a voice boomed behind them. Benny flinched, then turned to see the guard who had spoken to Leroy.

  “I was only looking,” Leroy said.

  “Look with your eyes, pal, not your fingers.”

  After a few uncomfortable seconds, Benny smiled at Leroy, then went to join him.

  “It’s hard to keep your hands off them, isn’t it?” she whispered.

  “I’ve spent whole afternoons here, just sitting.”

  They wandered through the maze of rooms, then walked back out into the twilight of the hot evening. The light, dim and glowing on one horizon, turned navy blue on the other. They went out for dinner at a Thai place on Third. When her meal came, Benny picked up her chopsticks, but they merely hovered over her plate.

  “How did he drown?” Leroy said.

  She twirled one of the sticks between her fingers.

  “Nobody saw it happen. He probably slipped and banged his head on the way into the water. Maybe he had a seizure.”

  “At least I got to say goodbye,” Leroy said.

  “Was she sick long?”

  Leroy shrugged. “It seemed like forever.”

  She told him how, after her father died, she was left wondering where he had gone and how she would carry on without him in her life. These were questions unanswered and unanswerable. She chose to be an engineer, then a scientist, not to solve these mysteries but to skirt around them. Heartache taught her to appreciate the hard facts of life, the mathematical equation and the classification system of organisms. That which never changes. She revered Newton with his calculus and billiard-ball universe that allows humans to control the physical world. She envied his certainty that cause and effect could be measured with precision, and that light could be taken apart and measured, without ceasing to believe in the Creator of that light. She honoured Linnaeus for binomial nomenclature, for his assurance that the nuthatch was a discreet species and different from the blue jay, and that everything had a name. She clung to the certainty of fact like a bird on a branch in a storm.

  Leroy stared at her as she ate.

  “I’m not ready for a boyfriend. Come back in five years.”

  “I’m in love with you now. I might be dead in five years.”

  She took his hand. How could it be that she could like him, really enjoy his company, but not want more than what she already had?

  They walked back to his lab. The lights were off. The place smelled yeasty and a couple of drained cans decorated Doug’s bench. Leroy went into the hall where the fridges stood against the wall between Gabe’s and Melvin’s office doors. He opened the fridge that belonged to his lab and found the cans of beer he was looking for. The stand-up freezer next to it held a clear bottle of pure ethanol they used to isolate DNA and he carried that, and the beer, back to his desk.

  “What are you doing?” Benny said.

  “Refuelling for the night.” He poured the ethanol into a beaker the size of a cappuccino cup and held the cold shot of pure alcohol. “Leach calls this stuff rocket fuel.” He lifted it to his lips and downed it, then winced and shook his head. He chased the alcohol with a sip of Budweiser. “I refuse to be morose.”

  “Well, I’m going to leave you to it,” she said. She turned her back to him and walked out.

  “Hey,” he called after her, but she flipped him a wave over her shoulder without looking back.

  Eight months passed from the time Benny explained to Leroy why she wanted to remain single. For a while Leroy visited her lab less frequently. She watched as he developed crushes on other students, even a virology professor down the hall. None of this went anywhere, and, try as he did to find an alternative, he was drawn back to sit by Benny’s desk while she worked. On a Friday afternoon in April, Leroy brought a beaker of beer and sat down.

  “You still drinking that shit,” she said. She was replenishing her stock of growth media and solutions for DNA purification.

  “Potent stuff,” was all he said.

  The squeak of heavy-soled leather shoes signalled the approach of Dr. Leach. He wore his lab uniform, a white polyester lab coat that fell to below his knees. It was buttoned up, leaving a V-shaped frame for his navy tie.

  “Timmins, do you live here?”

  It was Leach’s greatest anxiety that one of his discoveries would be stolen by another scientist. There was money to be made and fame to be won.

  “You know us grad students, Melvin. We basically do live here.”

  “Melvin, can I order some glass petri dishes?” Benny said.

  “What do you need them for?”

  “We could reuse them instead of throwing them out.”

  “The weekend’s here, Ben. Time to relax, let your hair down, have a bit of fun. Would you like to come into my office for a soda?”

  “Please don’t call me that.”

  “If she won’t, I’d like to, Melvin,” Leroy said, grinning.

  “I was asking Benita.”

  “Benita? Who’s that?”

  “I need to talk to you about something,” Leach said to Benny, ignoring Leroy.

  “I was going to go for a run.”

  “On a Friday night? I bet you’ve got a date. A good-looking girl like you must have plenty of dates.”

  “You never know, Melvin.”

  He looked at Leroy, shook his head, then strode back to his office. He called over his shoulder. “Glass dishes are too expensive.”

  Benny left the lab. She had been looking forward to this run all day. She was going to meet her new friend Rachel at the south end of the park. Benny jogged west, into the park, and headed south. She passed the zoo and ran around a lone horse, which looked weary and defeated as the hack urged it on with the clucking of his tongue. Its shod hooves clip-clopped on the pavement. She waited for Rachel on the sidewalk across from The Plaza. Even though Benny was living in a polluted city, with plastic everywhere, the barnyard smell from the row of horses and their manure piled against the curb, the fresh breeze coming out of the park, and the trees that towered over the street made her feel like she belonged there.

  Then she spotted Rachel running along Central Park South toward her. She was happy to see that ragged hair bobbing up and down over the backs of the tired horses. There was a fluttery feeling in her belly, and she started to run again to meet her new friend.

  18

  Forest Garden

  The days are getting shorter but continue to be hot and sunny. Today we will harvest potatoes from Lina’s no-till experiment. The dying tops of the potato plants lie on the brown straw. My fingers move the crumbles of straw and plunge into the friable ground, cool and moist. The grass is gone. An earthworm glistens in the soil. I push more straw aside and my fingers bump against a potato. Then another one beside it. There are teeth marks in many of them where mice have nibbled. Despite this we have a crop of gorgeous baking potatoes that will last all winter. No digging, no weeding.

  It is time to plant garlic. After lunch we take the largest bulbs from what we harvested in August and separate the cloves, putting the largest of them aside in a pot to be pressed into the ground. We rake the decaying straw off the potato bed and leave it in the walking rows. I step on a fork to loosen the soil. We pull out grass, dandelions, and hawkweed, and then rake the bed level. It’s a rectangle of dark earth with sharp corners and neat sides, weed-free and ready to plant. W
e shovel composted cow manure into the bed.

  We push the cloves into the soft ground, one every six inches, until we run out of garlic. I cut the sisal from a bale of oat straw, grab a flake, and shake it so it loosens, then spread the straw thickly on top of the bed. Finished, the blanket of golden straw contrasts with the green around it and the blue of the sky.

  The straw is dry and dusty, and the mixture of shit and straw aggravates my asthma, long dormant. I wheeze and cough. Lina goes to her tent and when she returns she hands me a pipe.

  “Smoke this.”

  “You want me to inhale smoke into my already messed-up lungs?”

  She tells me it’s medicine from her grandmother and I take it from her, find a match by the stove, and light it. I haven’t smoked anything since I left home. As soon as the smoke hits the back of my throat I cough it all out. She laughs at me.

  “Not so fast. Take a smaller drag.”

  It’s hot and rich. I hack up a wad of viscous, near-solid mucus, take a few steps into the trees, and spit it onto the ground. She’s laughing at me when I come back.

  “That was fast. You O.K.?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a mixture. It’s old, though. I’ll have to collect new leaves.”

  She takes my hand and we walk across the road to the clear-cut where we picked raspberries. She shows me the tall stalks of mullein with their spears of musky-smelling yellow flowers and, below these, the hairy leaves the colour of sage. She pulls a few of these off. We find elecampane growing in Martin and Jenifer’s garden and coltsfoot in the ditch along the road. We tie them up and hang them from branches above the stove in our outdoor kitchen beside the gummy leaves of tobacco she grew in our garden and harvested recently.

  I continue to smoke her grandmother’s mixture while the leaves we gathered dry. Once they dry, she crumbles them and puts them in her leather pouch. I smoke a bit each afternoon and my bouts of hacking and wheezing abate. My asthma all but disappears. Go figure.

  We wake to frost one morning the night of the full moon in September and Lina moves into my tent full-time. She says it will be warmer that way. Not that she needs an excuse. We hustle to finish the cabin, shingling the walls with cedar, framing the windows, and installing a wood stove and chimney. All this we do using only hand tools. I know that’s not saying a lot — it’s not the Chrysler Building — but it makes me proud every time I see the cabin in the clearing when I come home. And now it’s finished.